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Monday, November 30, 2015

Last year, We
Need Diverse Books (http://weneeddiversebooks.org),
a grassroots campaign to promote diversity in children and teen literature,
caught fire and spread throughout the book world. This campaign is not only encouraging
authors to write books with diverse characters, the movement also questioned
the publishing industry’s protest that books with diverse characters (including
people of color, LGBT and LGBTQIA, and people dealing with mental or physical
disabilities) will not sell. We Need Diverse Books (aka WNDB)
also pointed out the low representation of people of color who are authors, or
who work in publishing houses or literary agencies.

“In a Twitter
exchange on April 17th, 2014,
Ellen Oh and Malinda Lo expressed their frustration with the lack of diversity
in kidlit. This wasn’t a new conversation for Ellen or Malinda, just the
latest, this time in response to the all-white, all-male panel of children’s
authors assembled for BookCon’s May 31st reader event. In a series of tweets, Ellen
started talking about taking action. Several other authors, bloggers, and
industry folks piped up saying they would like to be involved as well.

We planned a
three-day event for May 1-3 to raise awareness, brainstorm solutions, and take
action (Diversify Your Shelves). Aisha Saeed primed the pump on April 24th with
the first tweet including the #WeNeedDiverseBooks hashtag. After Aisha’s
post, the hashtag started taking off, officially trending for the first time on
April 29th, around 9:30 pm EST.”

And, oh, how
the movement has grown.

The benefits of
reading diverse books (and not just beneficial for children, but for adults,
too) are many-fold: respect of various cultures, seeing one’s self reflected in
literature (and thus valued), and celebrating the commonality of the human
experience. As Rudine Sims Bishop stated in his 1990 article, diverse
literature gives readers, especially children, “mirrors and windows” to the
real world. This is summed up very well in the 2014 American Library
Association’s White Paper on the Importance of Diversity in Library Programs
and Material Collections for Children. In that article, the ALA said: “Diverse,
culturally authentic materials in library collections allow all children to
meet people like themselves and develop an appreciation for the beauty of their
culture and the cultures of others.”

So, I decided
six months ago to push myself out of my comfort zone and work up the nerve to
write a middle grade book with a Hispanic hero. The story is based on the legend
of El Cuco. When I was a kid, my stepdad, (who was Hispanic) tried to
scare me with this monster, telling me that El Cuco would catch me and
gobble me up if I didn’t behave. Yeah, lots of pre-adolescent eye rolling
ensued, but the tale stuck.

As I wrote, I
worried that I would fail, and fail epically. Because, c’mon on! I’m a white,
middle class/age heterosexual woman. What do I know about the joys and sorrows
and hopes and fears of a thirteen year old Hispanic boy? Man, that was a hard
barrier to push past. But, as the work progressed, I realized something. In my
head, I had “labeled” my character as a boy and Hispanic more than I had
labeled him as a fellow human being. A person with the same joys, sorrows,
hopes, and fears that I have. Oh sure, there are differences. Loads of
differences. But that’s what we writers do. We explore those differences, make
them familiar, celebrate the universal human themes, then roll them out onto
the paper.

I would be
curious to hear about other writers’ successes and struggles regarding
diversity in literature. I will admit: I am leery of backlash. I’ve already had
some friends question the integrity of my story because of who I am. And that’s
okay. They have the right to question. Change can only come about with open,
honest dialogue. And we’re all going to make mistakes. Do and say awkward
things as we all inch/step/leap into new territory. That’s okay, too. Because
wouldn’t it be a straight up wonder if we could get to the point where this
world—the world of books that you and I live in—wouldn’t need the #WNDB hashtag
anymore?

You know the
old expression: a picture is worth a thousand words? On the We Need Diverse
Books website, there is a collection of photos that sums up everything I
tried to say here. The ones in this article are from that website. Go check out
the others. Powerful stuff, folks. One of my favorites is below:

We need diverse books…

All photos courtesy of the We
Need Diverse Books website.

About the Author: DarbyKarchutis a best-selling author,
dreamer, and compulsive dawn greeter. She's been known to run in blizzards and
bike in lightning storms. When not dodging death by Colorado, Darby is busy
writing urban fantasy for tweens, teens, and adults, and she is now dipping the
toe of her running shoe into contemporary fiction. Her debut YA novel, GRIFFIN
RISING, was recently optioned for film. Darby’s other books include THE HOUND
AT THE GATE, THE STAG LORD, and coming in December, UNHOLY BLUE. Visit her atwww.darbykarchut.com

Sunday, November 29, 2015

Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Nov. 30, 1835 - April 21, 1910) better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist.
He wrote The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn, the latter often called "The Great American Novel".

Friday, November 27, 2015

Catherine Dilts announces the release of book two in her
Rock Shop Mystery series, Stone Cold Case (ISBN
# 9781432830991, 385 pages, hardcover and Kindle). Her amateur sleuth novel was
published on September 16, 2015 by Five Star-Cengage, and is available at Amazon,
Barnes
and Nobel, as well as Tattered Cover.

Rock shop owner Morgan Iverson's
discovery of human remains reopens a cold case and unhealed wounds in a small
Colorado mountain town, while her find of a rare gemstone sparks a dangerous
treasure hunt.

To PPW member Catherine Dilts, rock shops are like geodes
- both contain amazing treasures hidden inside their plain-as-dirt exteriors.
Catherine works as an environmental technician, and plays at heirloom vegetable
gardening and fishing. Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine has published several
of her short stories. You may learn more about Catherine’s writing at http://www.catherinedilts.com/

Purchase
title from an historical society. They had a small online. Instead of calling
them or having to put a check in the mail for the book, I was able to find the
title and order it in a few moments and outside of their business hours, but
during mine.

Conduct
several Internet searches for my research subject.

Collect
digital copies of files. I'm sort of old school creating PDFs and saving links
via email. If I were really tech savvy, I might use Evernote or my Trello boards to collect this data. Babysteps. I am working towards this.

Of course, after all my online tasks, I
went offline to read books and take notes. Soon, I'll make an in-person trip to
my subject's last home. While some of this could be accomplished via online
research, I'm grateful for the opportunity to visit in person. Plus, I will see how a writer many
decades ago lived and worked before the Internet and running water.

I try to use the Internet for good
whether it's asking for the perfect owl name for a fiction story or speaking
with writers on a daily basis about their stories and the process.

The Internet is a good thing for me.

How do you use the Internet to write? What's your most helpful tool?

About the Author: Stacy S. Jensen
worked as a newspaper reporter and editor for two decades. Today, she writes
picture books and revises a memoir manuscript. She lives in Colorado Springs
with her husband and son.

Monday, November 23, 2015

Editor’s Note: In addition to managing editor of Writing from the Peak, I volunteer for open critique liaison as Pikes Peak Writers the first
Wednesday of every month. As such I’m always interested in guest “critiquers.”
One such guest was J.T. Evans. I’ve been a member of a critique groups for many
years, but his critique was so novel and beneficial and his buzz words foreign
to me that I asked him to do a series of articles explaining them. Character filtering is the
first. Next month he’ll address word territory. I hope you'll find them as useful as
I do.

By J.T. Evans

Lots of phrases,
buzz words, slang, jargon, and perfectly cromulent words are thrown about
critique groups on a regular basis. Newcomers to critique groups can mentally
stumble when they hear something along the lines of, "The POV in your WIP
head hops through white room syndrome, and all of the narrative is written in
passive voice with lots of tense shifts."

POV? WIP? White rooms?
Is there padding on the walls of these white rooms? I feel like I'm going insane!
I know I'm tense, but how is that shifting around? Well, have no fear. I'm here
to help expand your vocabulary into the writerly world of the critique group.

This
month, I'm going to cover character
filtering.

Character filtering is
a style of writing where some, most, or all actions in a scene are forced
through a character's perception instead of letting the actions stand on their
own. In most writing, we know who the point of view character is, so telling us
that character saw an action is superfluous. It puts a layer between the
activities going on in the scene and the reader.

Here are some examples:

•George
watched as Melissa ran in front of the car.

•Harry
saw the ball bounce down the road.

•Laurin
watched Gerra see the arrows fly through the sky toward the two women.

All of these contain a
character (presumably the point of view character) observing something going
on. In the third example, we're double
filtering (yes, I've seen this before), which is even worse than normal. In
this case, two wrongs don't make a right.

Here's
how I would fix the above examples:

•Melissa
ran in front of the car.

•The
ball bounced down the road.

•Arrows
flew through the sky toward the two women.

See how succinct and to
the point the sentences become? If you need to cut words, character filtering
is a great place to start. If you've received feedback about complex sentences
or sentences that are too long, cutting out filtering is a good thing.

What if a character is helpless and only able to watch what
is going on around them? This might be a legitimate use of character filtering,
but I suggest there are better ways of exploring being tied up, paralyzed,
concussed so badly that coherent thought can't happen, and so on. I can see character
filtering being used to drive home the point that a character is unable to act.
However, repeating the pattern in close proximity might annoy your readers (and
agents and editors).

I’ve had people suggest
there are better ways to explore nonvisual senses, e.g. hearing, touch, and
smell by way of character filtering. In these cases, make sense the primary actor in the sentence. Example: Instead of
“Andrea heard the crunch of boots on the gravel behind her," delete heard and try writing it as: “Boots
crunched on the gravel behind Andrea.” Yes, this puts your protagonist at the
end of the sentence, but also puts the emphasis on the boots (and someone)
behind her. This is a good chance to avoid filtering and increase tension at the same time.

Lastly, I’ve heard the
argument that character filtering allows us to write our characters as reactive
to something in the moment. Something like, “Zach winced as he watched the
baseball bat thud into Charlie’s knee,” works well enough. I recommend a slight
edit: “The baseball bat arced toward Charlie’s knee. Zach couldn’t handle the
violence and closed his eyes hard against the thud of the bat into flesh.”
Okay. Maybe the “fixed” part is a little overwritten, but here’s your chance to
show something about Zach’s character as well. We still get the same effect.
Poor Charlie’s knee will never be the same.

If you've heard a
phrase or word in a critique group and you think others should know about it
(or you're not sure what to think of it), drop me a comment below, and I'll add
it to my list of Buzz Words to talk about.

About the
Author:J.T. Evans writes fantasy novels. He also dabbles with science
fiction and horror short stories. He is the president of Pikes Peak Writers.
When not writing, he secures computers at the Day Job, homebrews great beers,
spends time with his family, and plays way too many card/board/role-playing
games.

Sunday, November 22, 2015

"Painful as it may be, a significant emotional event can be the catalyst for choosing a direction that serves us, and those around us, more effectively. Look for the learning." ~ Louisa May Alcott

Though Louisa May Alcott, (11-29-1832-03-06-1888) is often associated with the sweetness of her characters in Little Women, she was a tough woman, shaped largely by her experience growing up in poverty. The beloved writer wrote what she called "moral pap" for the young" because it paid well.

Friday, November 20, 2015

Carol
Berg’s epic fantasy novel, Ash and Silver
(ISBN 978-0451417268, Trade paperback, ebook, & audio, 496 pages), was
released on December 1, 2015 by Penguin Random House/Roc Books. It is available
wherever books are sold and at audio.com.

Lucian
de Remeni's life has been irredeemably transformed since his portraits began to
show things he couldn't possibly know. His family is dead. His own
people accuse him of madness. Beings of legend insist his magic breaks the
world that is already reeling from a bloody civil war. Lucian's pursuit of
answers leads him to a secretive, violent military Order, a soulless mentor who
steals his memory, and along a trail of corruption through the depths of
history and beyond the boundaries of the world.

Carol
Berg’s fifteen epic fantasy novels have won the Prism Award, the Geffen Award,
and multiple Colorado Book Awards. Her duology, Flesh and Spirit
and Breath and Bone, won the Mythopoeic Fantasy Award for Adult
Literature, and she is a regular panelist/presenter at writers’ conferences and
science fiction conventions. All amazing for one who majored in math and
computer science to avoid writing papers. Her latest novel, Ash and
Silver, is out from Penguin Random House in December 2015. She
calls writing “the hobby that ate my life.”

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

I’ve been going to a lot of book stores lately, on tour with
the Nightmares Unhinged anthology,
published by Colorado’s own Hex Publishing. It’s been fun, but I have to say, I
sit looking at the book covers wondering if I’ve ruined my writing career.

I’ll never be a debut author again. Now, my Amazon ranking
is available for everyone to see. Agents, editors can see how many books I’m
selling. And the numbers aren’t, um, staggering.

Should I have waited for the big game? Should I have
written, submitted, chewed on the rejections, written, submitted and dined yet
again on rejection steak with extra hate sauce?

That’s what writers have done for millennia. Or at least the last couple hundred years. Ray Bradbury got nearly a thousand rejections before
he sold anything, and that’s Ray flippin’ Bradbury. Stephen King filled up a railroad
spike on his wall with rejection letters.

I wrote a whole bunch of books, but only got a few rejection
letters. I was just too afraid to send out queries, and then when I did get
enough courage, the whole publishing industry shifted under my feet. Suddenly,
people were publishing books on their own. Small presses, micro-presses, garage
presses were publishing books. Books whirled into the world on a hurricane of
hope and coffee. Mine included.

But should I have waited for the big game?

It’s too late now. I have three books out in the world with
another six in the queue. I’m no longer a virgin. I’m now an experienced lover,
maybe (probably) prostitute, and the bloom of my youth has faded from my weary
face.

Should I have waited?

If I was looking for status? Yes, I should’ve waited.
Getting the big agent and the big publisher would’ve given me more status. It
would’ve also given me the satisfaction of a dream fulfilled as close to my
fantasies as I could get.

Would I be more famous if I would’ve waited? Roll the dice,
I don’t know.

Would I richer if I would’ve waited? Probably not.

Most likely if I would’ve waited another ten years, I’d be
about where I’m at. Maybe not, but the reality is, I didn’t wait.

How could I have waited? I’d already spent twenty years
working on thirteen books. People all around me were storming the gates of heaven
either on their own or with their own small press. I was speaking at writer
conferences, and I felt dumb because I didn’t have a book in the bookstore. It
just made sense for me to take the plunge.

The reality is, lots of people get the big agent and the
big publisher and their books languish, unread, unedited, dead.

My books are out in the world and people are reading them.
I’ve walked across many a desert of fear and self-doubt. I’ve made some money,
Starbucks money, but cash dollars nonetheless. I’ve lived parts of the dreams.

And I did it while I was still alive. Who knows? In ten
years, I might be dead, and if I would’ve waited, I might’ve waited for all
eternity.

But I still get sad sometimes. I still have doubts. And
regrets? I’ve had a few.

I sometimes think about Jane Austen, who found a publisher
for one of her books, but quickly pulled it from the market, too fearful to put
herself out in the world. And yet, two hundred years later, if anyone bad
mouths Pride and Prejudice, I’ll kick
their ass.

Yes, I’m unagented and I don’t have a big publisher. Yet,
my books are published. Three of them. Each such a victory.

I might have ruined my career by not waiting, but then
again, I’m not dead. I have lots of books to write, and yeah, I’ll continue to
query the beast and collect my rejections, and yes, the odds are even worse for
me because the publishing industry can look at my sales. However, and this is
the biggest, most earth-shattering however possible, if I do hit the big time,
the more rejections I have, the better my story becomes. The harder and less
likely? The better the story.

And isn’t the point of life to live a really good story?

Aaron Michael Ritchey is
the author of The Never Prayer, Long Live the Suicide King, and Elizabeth’s Midnight. In shorter
fiction, his G.I. Joe inspired novella was an Amazon bestseller in Kindle
Worlds and his steampunk story, “The Dirges of Percival Lewand” was part of The Best of Penny Dread Tales anthology
published through Kevin J. Anderson’s WordFire Press. His upcoming young adult
sci-fi/western epic series will also be published through WordFire Press. In
2015, his second novel won the “Building the Dream” award for best YA novel,
and he spent the summer as the Arist in Residence for the Anythink Library. He
lives in Colorado with his wife and two ancient goddesses of chaos posing as
his daughters.

For more about him, his books, and how to overcome artistic angst,
visit www.aaronmritchey.com. He’s on Facebook as Aaron Michael Ritchey and he tweets -
@aaronmritchey.

Monday, November 16, 2015

By: Donnell Ann BellPeople love to give advice.They love to share their point
of view. Oftentimes, I listen. Oftentimes, I think this person doesn’t have a
clue what he’s talking about. However, I recently received some advice that I think is
invaluable—particularly when it comes to writing.

If you’re writing in first person, you can probably stop
reading right now. This stellar advice doesn’t apply to you because let’s face
it—you only have one point of view. But if you have multiple points of view in
your novel, and it’s not working for some reason, consider rewriting (no
screaming allowed) in another character’s POV.

Ask yourself this:Am I writing the scene in the POV character who has the most to lose?

Example:

If the antagonist has thrown the protagonist off a cliff,
and left the hero for dead, and no one’s around, you’re going to have a pretty
compelling scene because clearly you’re in your hero’s head, and you’re going
to show his desperation as he tries to save himself.

But . . . let’s say your antagonist throws the protagonist
off the cliff, then sticks around to taunt him.

Whose
POV would be most effective?

Some might say the anger seething through the hero.He’s trying to hang on for dear life,
and the villain shows him a rope. “Gee, I’d like to save you,” your bad guy says, “but the
rope it appears to be . . . slipping.” Then he throws it as far as he can.

Imagine your protagonist believing the antagonist plans to
save him, and all hope is lost . . . . (until, if you’re any kind of writer and
not a sadist, the hero finds a root, and with super human strength heroes tend
to have in our stories, pulls himself upward and saves himself.)

Or let’s see the same scene through the antagonist’s eyes.
The hero has thwarted his every move, stolen his girl, and repossessed his car!
Villain’s hatred runs deep. Watching hero fall onto the rocks would cause a
gleeful moment for bad guy. It would also show what a menacing creature he is.
Imagine his shock when the hero pulls himself up, despite the villain’s best
efforts, and the two engage in an amazing fight scene.

Ideally, you get the idea. Point of View is important to
your story.Ask yourself who has
the most to risk. And if you’re not sure, a great exercise is to write in
various POVs. The only problem is then you’ll have a
decision to make.About the Author:Donnell Ann Bell is the editor of Pikes Peak Writers Writing from the Peak blog and a mystery and romantic suspense author. Check out her books at www.donnellannbell.com

Friday, November 13, 2015

Kelly Michelle Baker’s YA fantasy, The Waters of Nyra: Volume II (ISBN: 1508732795, paperback and ebook, 98,000 words) was released September 5, 2015 by CreateSpace. The book is available at Amazon.

After braving the ocean, Nyra is incarcerated by the Zealer Dragons. The would-be saviors are in the midst of civil war, and her presence inflames their rivalry. She is held prisoner with Olieve; a Royal as garrulous as she is blind, neither friend nor foe, but essential to the young dragon’s escape. Yet even escape has little promise, as Nyra becomes the center of superstition and murder. At the crux of deceit, Nyra must unearth new weapons and learn the identity of a mysterious hero. Only then can she return home and at long last free her downtrodden kin.

Born a U.S. military brat, Kelly grew up on both coasts and everywhere in between. She studied at the University of Colorado at Boulder and California State University Stanislaus, earning a master’s in Ecology and Sustainability. When not writing or trying to save the world, she enjoys drawing, theater, long walks, and new recipes. The Waters of Nyra is her first novel. She calls Colorado Springs home.

Pikes Peak Writers

Welcome to the official blog of Pikes Peak Writers. We aim to inform, educate, enrich, and entertain writers. NOTE: The posts appearing on this blog may not be reposted or reprinted without the express permission of the author and Pikes Peak Writers.